


run the red out

by searidings



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, but first: angst, canon divergent from 4x22, friends to almost lovers to angry face emoji to lovers, how season 5 might have gone if red daughter wasn't immediately forgotten, i'm in the business of happy endings, in kara's case there's like eight layers of gay confusion and denial for a start, they've got A Lot to work through
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 20:14:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29906460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/searidings/pseuds/searidings
Summary: red daughter is dead, yes, but she's not gone. not really. kara (and lena) have to come to terms with what that means.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 71
Kudos: 390





	run the red out

**Author's Note:**

> title from 'opaline' by novo amor
> 
> chapter title from 'towers' by bon iver

The first red flag is the accent.

She puts it down to tiredness, initially. Exhaustion running marrow-deep, a physical and mental weariness born of too many life-altering events in a row with no time in between to catch her breath. After the week, month, _year_ Kara’s had, anyone would be a little loopy.

The past 24 hours have seen the death of Lex Luthor and her own exoneration from charges of domestic terrorism. They’ve seen Argo saved from annihilation by satellite cannon, seen thousands of aliens released from a death sentence as disposable batteries. Kara has— she’s been busy. She’s had a lot on her mind.

So it’s easy enough not to dwell on uncomfortable things. She doesn’t have the _energy_ to dwell. Groans loudly enough to wake the dead when the insistent ringing of her Supergirl phone tugs her rudely from the snatched hour of sleep she’d snuck in after the chaos of Lex’s demise. She answers tiredly, free hand scrubbing roughly over her still closed eyes. “Alex?”

But it sounds wrong, even to her own ears. The syllables are too short, almost clipped; the stress on both too even. The _a_ sound is light, breathier than her usual rolling diction and the second syllable lacks its typical roundedness; too open, too low.

Kara says her sister’s name as if it’s unfamiliar, as if it’s not the third most frequent word in her vocabulary after _pot stickers_ and _oops._ She says it as if she’s utterly unversed in the English language and is sounding out the word as she goes.

She says it, worryingly, not dissimilarly to the way she used to pronounce her sister’s name when she first landed on Earth. When the rounded vowels and harsh pauses of Kryptonian still stung in her throat and stuck behind her teeth. When giving them up in favour of the flattened drawl of North American English felt like losing everything all over again.

It’s weird and jarring enough to make Alex pause for almost an entire half-second before she launches into a description of the latest disaster to hit National City, but Kara is too tired and too overwhelmed to worry much about it in this moment.

She just slips into her suit and then out of her window into the chill of the night air, and the urgent immediacy of a rogue acid-spewing superslug rampaging through the business district is enough to banish all thoughts of phonetic variation clean from Kara’s mind.

After that, it’s the nightmares.

Once home again, sluiced clean of slug acid and dropping with tiredness as she crawls back into bed, she dreams of Lex.

That in itself isn’t unusual. Given their history, given the sheer number of attempts on her life she’s withstood at his hands, the elder Luthor’s deranged grin has long been a feature of Kara’s nightmares.

She dreams of him now, of his face as he lines up the killing blow. Of his body suspended above Shelley Island by her grasp, his life in her hands like the god she never wanted to be. “Let me save you,” she screams, desperate to keep his blood off her already dripping hands.

“I’d rather die,” Lex smiles, and then he does.

The Lexosuit doesn’t save him. _Kara_ doesn’t save him. She dreams of his eyes as he falls, as he dies.

Hatred and anger bubble up in her throat, dipped in a familiar cloying guilt as they choke her airways but it’s even more than that now, somehow.

It’s rage and fear and disbelief and betrayal and a sadness so profound it aches in her sternum, and Kara wakes with tears tracking over her temples and soaking into her hair.

She hates Lex, fears and despises the man in near equal measure and yet in this moment she is _grieving_ him. If in this very second she were given the opportunity to bring him back from the dead, she cannot honestly say what she’d choose.

The incognizable logic behind her own emotional state in this moment terrifies her more than the nightmare itself and Kara vaults out of bed, trembling. Bolts out her window and doesn’t stop flying until the ground turns to snow beneath her. Punches a few thousand tons of solid ice into submission until she feels like she can breathe again.

She tries not to sleep after that. But after the nightmares come the waking memories, the daylight confusion, and that might even be worse.

The limited benefits of avoiding her night terrors are quickly matched by the drawbacks of exhaustion, and it’s not like she has time to sit back and take things slow. Balancing being a Catco reporter against being Supergirl has never exactly been easy, but the days after the release of Kara’s exposé on Lex ratchet the crazy up to entirely new levels.

Between the attention her article is getting worldwide, the job offers she’s fielding from every major newspaper in the country, and the grudgingly respectful microscope Snapper now has her under, it’s near impossible for her to sneak a nap at her desk. Or to sneak away unnoticed on Supergirl business, which is proving to be an even bigger problem.

She tries to catch James’ attention, tries to shoot him her most meaningful _I need to get out of here_ look but he’s distant and withdrawn, still reeling from the trauma of the past few weeks.

She can’t really blame him. Kara herself is distracted at work; jumpy and unfocused with a constant thrum of anxiety in the pit of her stomach, an ever-present sense of impending doom. She can’t concentrate, attention bouncing haphazardly between the article she’s supposed to be writing and every other sight, sound, and smell in a five mile radius.

This skittishness is exhausting, so when she sees a head of sleek dark hair across the bullpen and the frantic pace of the world seems to _still_ for just a moment, she grasps the wave of feeling with both hands. It’s the heady pull of guaranteed relief, the promise of pause, and Kara’s pushing back from her desk before her conscious mind has given the instruction. Lena and the oasis of calm she represents, the halcyon eye of Kara’s storm, is almost within reach when her comms crackle to life in her ear and Kara is jogging to the bathroom and shooting out of the window almost before she has time to register her disappointment.

The crisis of the hour is a young boy who’d fallen over a cliff on a misty hike a little way up the coast. She finds him trapped on a high ledge, trembling through sobs.

“Hey, it’s okay,” she says as gently as she can, wary of his tears. Wary of the mistrust her suit may still evoke after her body double’s stunt at the White House. “I’m Supergirl. I’m going to get you out of here. Can you tell me your name?”

The little blonde boy’s eyes are wide as dinner plates, his knuckles white where he grips at the rough stoneface. “Myles,” he whispers after a moment, sniffling.

“Hey, Myles,” she says with as reassuring a smile as she can muster, tuning out the frantic calls and thundering heartbeats of the boy’s parents thirty feet above to focus solely on him. “How about I fly you back up to your mom and dad?”

The child gives a wobbly nod and Kara reaches out. “I’m gonna need you to let go of the rock and hang onto me instead, okay buddy? I promise I won’t let you fall.”

It takes a few minutes of coaxing but eventually the young boy releases his death-grip on the cliff face and latches onto Kara like a koala, four limbs wrapped around her tight as his tiny muscles can manage. She feels his racing heart, fast as a hummingbird’s. Feels the way he clutches at her with the unshakeable faith that she will stand between him and any danger.

Something jolts through her like a firebolt and she tightens her own grip on the child as a deep protectiveness courses through her veins, floating them both carefully up to the clifftop.

She’s barely touched down when the boy’s parents surge forward. They all but rip him from Kara’s grasp to press relieved kisses to his head and Kara burns hot, too hot for a moment and all she wants to do is snatch him back.

She wants to hold him. To shield him with her own body. To drink tea and share chocolate and play soccer and strip the flesh from the bones of any who try to hurt him.

Her fists clench and her throat burns cold and she feels the tell-tale glow of impending laser vision behind her eyes as she stares at the people who have taken him from her. His eyes, his sweet innocent eyes stare up at her from under his dark curls and Kara is ready to start snapping bones because it isn’t fair, Mikhail is just a _child—_

The boy’s father throws himself at her and she’s so close, she’s _so_ close to letting go. But then she registers the muffled gasps of his sobs, the thanks he whispers into her shoulder like a prayer. Her eyes cool and she looks again at the boy, at Myles, at his blonde hair and pale skin and everything else that’s not, that’s not—

Kara’s heart is racing in her chest like a runaway locomotive. She barely manages to untangle herself from the grateful family and shoot off to a deserted stretch off clifftop before she’s bent double and retching, emptying the contents of her stomach into the nearest bush.

She wipes her mouth with the back of one trembling hand. Her skin feels clammy which is, frankly, a new and unwelcome development, physiologically speaking. But that’s the least of her problems right now because she’d almost just burnt up two people, two innocent parents of an innocent boy. Almost just incinerated them on the spot, and for what? For the memory of a child she’d never met, a child whose name she’d once seen in a journal.

A child who means nothing to her. A child who, in that moment, had felt like he meant everything.

Shuddering, she forces herself upright. Whatever’s been going on with her lately stops _now_. Sure, she’s been avoiding sleep to evade the incessant nightmares, but clearly that’s not working out. Clearly, it’s just prompting a new kind of hallucination.

Well, no more. She needs to get a grip on herself before anything like this has the chance to happen again. Before anyone else can get hurt.

Kelly would probably call it PTSD.

Admittedly, Kara hasn’t had the smoothest month. Discovering the existence of a clone of herself in the clutches of her vilest enemy, only to have that clone sacrifice herself to save Kara’s life, _presumably_ qualifies as a traumatic event from which one might experience some ongoing repercussions.

But the thing is, Kara just doesn’t have _time_ to be traumatised. She doesn’t have time to be distressed or confused, to be mistaking one child she’s never met for another child she’s never met and almost doing something unthinkable in the process. This world needs a hero, needs a Super, and she’s the only one left.

She’s just going to have to get over it.

Maybe she can mention it to Kelly at game night later on, though. Just to see if she has any advice, any trauma quick-fixes in her psychologist’s arsenal. Even as she thinks it, Kara knows it’s ridiculous. She knows that the things Kelly would ask for in order to begin the process of her healing, Kara isn’t prepared to give.

So she knows she won’t mention it. She’s the Girl of _Steel._ She brought down Lex Luthor almost singlehandedly. If she can handle _that,_ she can certainly handle this. Whatever it is.

At least she’ll see Alex tonight too. Her sister’s presence has always been a balm on Kara’s soul, with no need for questions or confessions between them. And now that she has Alex back, all of her, including the part that knows she’s Supergirl— that simple fact relieves a weight that’s been collapsing Kara’s spine for _months._ Now she can finally stand tall again.

Back at her desk and dodging yet more calls from yet more rival news outlets, she feels a sudden rush of gratitude for her sister that sparks tears at the corners of her vision. Abruptly and with overwhelming certainty, she is acutely aware of just how lucky she was to have had the Danvers to guide her when she first landed on Earth. Of how very differently things might have turned out if she hadn’t. Of how _good_ her Alex is, when not all of them are.

The torrent of emotion is unforeseen and a little overwhelming. But at least this time it doesn’t involve the urge to inflict grievous bodily harm on any nearby humans, so Kara lets it slide. With the week she’s having, tearing up at her desk for no discernible reason seems pretty par for the course.

She resolves to give Alex an extra big hug at game night, and goes back to work.

After the memories come the _urges._

Game night feels like the first hint of normalcy she’s experienced in months. Between Nia’s incomprehensible pop culture references and Brainy’s card counting and Alex’s complaining, it’s more than enough to tug a genuine smile onto her lips. More than enough to help her forget that not three days earlier, she’d been Public Enemy Number One with Lex Luthor the puppet master of the entire US government. Kara shudders. Takes a healthy swig of Maldorian rum to wash away the aftertaste.

She’s feeling warm and safe and happy and only a little bit like she wants to cry because of it. Alex is practically glowing as she wraps her in a tight hug, lovestruck and blushing as she sneaks secret glances at Kelly across the room and Kara is _definitely_ storing up blackmail material for the next time her sister gets too big for her boots. Things are good. Things are finally almost normal.

And then Lena arrives and Kara lets out a breath she didn’t even realise she’d been holding. Green eyes meet hers as Lena takes her seat across the coffee table and without warning, Kara _ignites._

A white hot flash shoots through her entire body. Her blood is practically buzzing in her veins, her muscles blazing. If _this_ is yet another consequence of chronic overtiredness, it’s news to Kara. She clenches her hands hard around the arms of her chair so she can’t bodily throw herself at the other woman. Winces at the sure sound of splintering wood.

Kara’s heart is pounding in her throat as she tries to get herself back under control. This is by no means the first time her own body’s reactions have come as a shock in the past couple of days, but it’s certainly the most intense. She feels inexplicably like she’s burning alive, and the only thing that can soothe her is Lena.

She makes it through small talk and half a game of Uno, her white-knuckled grip on her chair never easing an inch. If the others notice her strangled voice and burning cheeks or the tenuous handle Kara’s currently maintaining on her own impulse control, they have the good grace not to comment.

What in Rao’s name is happening to her? Kara’s no stranger to overexertion, though even in her extensive experience it’s never usually accompanied by the desire to invade someone else’s personal space quite this recklessly. Every time she so much as glances in Lena’s direction she’s overcome with the urge to close the five feet of distance between them as fast as Kryptonianly possible.

She digs her nails tighter into the splintering wood of her chair. Tries valiantly, and ultimately in vain, to ignore the way her body wants to react to every minute fluctuation in Lena’s mere existence like some kind of jacked up symbiosis.

It’s like the polar opposite of what she feels when her body is exposed to Kryptonite. Instead of needing to get as far from the source as possible, she feels she might die if she doesn’t get _closer._

Kara’s heart is thudding so hard in her ears that she doesn’t even hear the offer of a drinks refill. Barely notices Alex and Brainy’s heated argument about the legality of using a skip and a draw-four in the same turn. In fact, she doesn’t register anything at all, until Lena is standing and brushing past her en route to the wine table, the faint scent of her perfume lingering like a siren song.

Kara’s up and following her before she realises she’s made the decision. All higher brain function has ceased in the wake of the overwhelming need to be close to the other woman. If she doesn’t touch Lena _now,_ she might not survive.

Lena glances up expectantly at her approach, fingers stilling against the bottle of ridiculously expensive merlot. Her expression shifts to concern as she takes in what Kara’s sure must be the crazed glint in her own eyes. She opens her mouth in question, but Kara beats her to it.

“Didn’t get a chance to properly say hi before,” she manages only a little frantically, and holds out her arms in invitation.

Lena appraises her for a long moment, seemingly unconvinced of Kara’s sanity. Kara doesn’t blame her. But after a boundless eternity lasting about two and a half seconds she finally, blessedly, steps forward.

The sensation that bursts through her at the first touch of Lena’s skin on hers is like nothing Kara has ever experienced. It’s the warmth and comfort and _home_ that she’s always felt in the other woman’s embrace but it’s also brighter than that, jagged and electric. It’s a hot flash that lasts only a moment but feels like an infinity; an infinity of yearning, of longing, of wondering, and now she _knows._ At last she has the resolution, the answer, right here in her arms.

This sudden feeling of light in the darkness, of a hand reaching out as she drowns— it’s addictive. She’s chasing the high before her conscious mind can register it, smoothing her hands down Lena’s sides, sliding beneath the hem of her shirt to stroke over hot, soft skin. Lena’s breathing hitches in her chest but it barely even registers as Kara tugs the other woman tighter against her. Presses her face, nose, lips to the cradle of Lena’s neck and shoulder to breathe her in.

The feeling only gets stronger the closer Kara presses, the more of Lena she can reach. Her burning body cools, soothed by a peace running bone-deep. She buries her face in Lena’s loose hair, nosing up the column of her throat and behind her ear where the warm untempered essence of her is strongest.

Lena shivers, hands tightening against the fabric of Kara’s shirt. Kara’s just about to press her mouth to the pounding epicentre of Lena’s pulse to see if it feels as sweet as it sounds when someone clears their throat behind her, loud and deliberate.

She freezes, lips parted a half-inch above Lena’s skin. Blinks back into some semblance of self-awareness and releases the other woman from her embrace with a nervous cough, cheeks practically glowing under the force of her flush.

She turns to find every pair of eyes in the room locked incredulously onto her face. Nia smirks at her conspiratorially as Alex drops her head into her hands.

Blushing furiously, Kara attempts to divert attention away from her own inappropriate behaviour by reaching out to refill Lena’s drink. Misjudges substantially and shatters both bottle and glass in her nervous grip, dousing herself and Lena in a litre of red wine.

Game night eventually resumes once both of them are decked out in the spare DEO-issue sweatsuits J’onn had lying around. No one mentions Kara’s little performance beyond the exasperated looks her sister keeps sending her way. Lena smiles kindly at the end of her stumbling apology, even lays a consoling hand on her arm that has Kara lighting up like a livewire all over again.

She makes it to the end of the evening by the skin of her teeth and bolts as soon as J’onn lets out his first pointed yawn. Throws a harried goodbye over her shoulder and tries desperately not to listen to whatever comments her friends were too polite to say to her face.

Back in the relative safety of her apartment, Kara sinks onto the couch and slaps herself resoundingly on the forehead. So much for getting over the weirdness she’s been feeling lately.

If whatever the hell _that_ was tonight is what she gets for going too many days with too little rest, then she’s just going to have to sleep for a week.

Naturally, she doesn’t sleep at all.

Instead, she spends a frustrated six hours replaying the evening in her mind on a loop. She relives the spark of Lena’s skin against her own over and over, imagines the warm base smell of her beneath her shampoo and expensive perfume. Basks in it, revels in it, then realises what she’s doing and tries desperately to pretend that she isn’t.

It’s not Kara’s best night. Morning dawns bright and cold to find her twisted furiously in a mess of sheets and blankets, scratchy-eyed and irritated.

The day doesn’t improve much from there. She stops a bank heist downtown, only to have her ass handed to her in no uncertain terms by Snapper for missing a newsroom meeting when she gets back. Has barely finished grovelling when a tour bus crashes through the barrier and plummets off a bridge twenty minutes north of the city and she has to shoot off again.

She’s trying in vain to disguise the scent of petrol still clinging to her hair as Snapper chews her out _again_ on her return and Kara claims exploding diarrhoea before she realises what she’s said, grimacing. That, at least, prompts her boss to give her a wide berth.

She’s finally sitting down to work on her latest article when a rogue Snorlax she’s been tangling with for weeks chooses his moment to break into a luxury car dealership downtown. Kara growls, leaves her muffin basket irritatingly uneaten on her desk and all but throws herself out of the bathroom window.

The Snorlax seems disinclined to go down without a fight. He’s using every dirty trick in the book and somewhere between the venomous slime he’s spread all over the floor and his use of the terrified salesmen as human shields, Kara loses her patience.

The Snorlax tosses a receptionist aside like a ragdoll, making a beeline for a hideous yellow Tesla, and Kara seizes her opportunity. A gust of freeze breath knocks him off course and when he rips off a car door to launch at her like a missile, she laser visions it into oblivion right there in his claws.

Her target shrieks, slithering backwards and away from the smouldering remains and this is her chance to nab him but Kara is frozen, staring at the deformed hunk of metal. Something’s wrong; the residue isn’t glowing the familiar icy blue she’s used to associating with her laser vision. It’s _purple._

Brow furrowed, she shoots another experimental burst at the dismembered car. The Snorlax howls again, cowering, but Kara barely notices because sure enough, the glowing edges of her vision are not the usual cyan but a faint pulsing lilac.

_What in Rao’s name?_ She fists a hand in the Snorlax’s collar to fly them both back to the DEO, pouting. _Purple_ laser vision? That’s— unexpected. Not to mention inconvenient. Kara’s not really in the market for a colour scheme overhaul. Primary colours are kind of her whole thing.

She’s still mulling over this latest development, and maybe pining just a little after her abandoned muffin basket back at Catco, by the time the Snorlax has been processed and taken down to holding. A pair of snapping fingers millimetres from her nose makes her jump.

“Earth to Kara,” Alex says, watching her carefully. “You okay?”

Kara blinks. Maybe she should tell Alex, tell her about the laser vision and the nightmares and the funky memories that have taken up residence inside her skull. Maybe her sister will know what’s going on. Will know what to do about it.

Kara sighs. Maybe her sister will make her spend the rest of the day under the sun lamps as she runs test after test, more than likely involving Kryptonite needles in places no sun, red _or_ yellow, has ever shone. Maybe she’ll ask about her embarrassing malfunction at game night. Maybe she’ll grill her on not just her physical symptoms but – Kara shudders – on her _feelings._

That settles it. “Fine,” she answers, shooting for a smile and hoping she makes it. “Gotta get back to work. Snapper doesn’t need any more excuses to fire me today.”

By the time Alex thinks to glance at the clock and sees it’s already well after five pm, Kara is gone.

After the laser vision comes the inexplicable multilingualism.

She decides to take the long way home. The _long way,_ a malleable term at the best of times, ends up consisting of two dozen laps of the city’s perimeter and a quick trip up into the stratosphere, not stopping until her lungs start to protest the thinning air. Hovering high high high above the city, she sucks in a deep breath.

She’s always loved the silence, the stillness up here. The quiet isn’t oppressive, not like the stifling loneliness of the Phantom Zone. It’s just peaceful. And with a split second of focus she can zone into anywhere in the city, can hear the new-borns crying in the maternity wing of the children’s hospital or the sit coms blaring in the retirement homes. Can hear the waves lapping at the sea wall in the bay, the wind whipping through the leaves in the park, the shoots pushing up through the soil and the buds unfurling on the branches.

Up here above the hazy layer of cloud and pollution the air is clean and cold. It burns a little in her lungs, sterilising. Purifying. The sun is all-encompassing at this height, streaming unimpeded across her body and making her cells sing.

She reaches a hand out in front of her to examine it, backlit against the sun’s glow. It’s mesmerising, the way the light and shadow play across her bones and tendons as she tilts her wrist back and forth, curling and uncurling her fingers. It’s beautiful, she thinks. Красивый.

Kara drops twenty feet in the air involuntarily, blinking through shock. What the _hell?_ What language was that? It certainly wasn’t Kryptonian, or English or Spanish or any of the other romance languages she’d taken in school.

The high, closed vowels, the guttural _r—_ it had sounded more Slavic than anything. Russian, most likely. But Kara doesn’t _speak_ any of those languages, wouldn’t have a clue about anything more complicated than asking for perogies at the Polish bakery.

This is a step too far now. Memories she can’t quite recall experiencing, mysterious déjà vu— those, she might be able to explain away. But translating her own thoughts into a language she’s certain she’s never learned? Something decidedly hinky is going on in her brain, and it’s starting to freak her out.

She twists her fingers together in front of her, considering. Who does she know that might be able to help with the inexplicable things taking place in her mind? Or, at the very least, won’t strap her to a sun bed and stick her with a Kryptonite needle for bringing it up?

Kara takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders, and shoots back down to Earth.

She finds J’onn in his office. Accepts the hot cocoa he offers, takes a seat on the worn leather couch at his invitation. Takes a deep breath, and blurts it all out. The weird accent, the memories that aren’t quite hers, her sudden inexplicable knowledge of _Russian_ , of all things.

She leaves out the part about wanting to throw herself at Lena the second she’d laid eyes on her. J’onn had witnessed that particular trainwreck first hand, after all. Kara’s cheeks are already burning; she’s not sure there’s a need to relive that specific event in any more detail.

J’onn is watching her closely. He hasn’t laughed yet, or looked at her like she’s finally lost it completely. That’s something. “And when did you first notice all of this?”

Kara bites her lip, thinking. “Maybe three days ago?”

“Hmmm.” He glances at her out of the corner of his eye. “Russian, you said?”

Kara nods. J’onn’s brow furrows, his expression thoughtful. “When you beat Lex Luthor at Shelley Island, how did you do it?”

“I almost didn’t,” Kara sighs. “He would have killed me if Red Daughter hadn’t—”

Her eyes widen. “ _No._ ” She stares at J’onn, who’s watching her carefully. “Do you think that’s what it is?”

J’onn shrugs. “You said that when she died, you felt that you’d absorbed her powers. That that was what made you strong enough to defeat Lex.” He meets her gaze dead on. “It makes sense that her abilities weren’t the only thing you assimilated.”

Kara pushes up from the couch hard, standing to pace around the room. “You mean I got all of her? That she’s here, in me, right now?”

Rao, it does make sense. Not just her sudden baffling knowledge of Russian but all the other stuff too. Half-memories of events she’d never lived. Mixed emotions towards Lex. The sudden intensity of her feelings toward Alex—

“Can you remember?” J’onn asks, pulling her momentarily from her spiral. “If you try, if you consciously look, can you access her memories?”

Kara stares at him for a moment, her breaths coming in shallow gasps. She closes her eyes and it’s as if she’s been bobbing peacefully in a calm ocean staring happily back at the shore when all of a sudden an enormous, merciless wave crashes over her from behind, dragging her under.

She sees men, lots of them, armed to the teeth. She’s afraid of them but they take her in, give her a thick coat to keep her warm. They’re speaking all the while in a language she can’t understand and when she opens her mouth to tell them so, only one word comes out. _Alex._

She sees her room, her ever-growing pile of books, the joy of the worlds she found within them. She sees Lex – _Alex_ – and the elation of his visits, feels his hand on her cheek as the first non-clinical physical contact of her life.

She sees afternoon tea with Mikhail and learning to play soccer, learning to temper her strength and be gentle with this fragile, lovely little boy. She sees the screaming, incandescent agony of Kryptonite exposure and the lonely oppressive dark of her containment chamber.

She sees America in all its filth and all its perverse glory. Sees herself in a dark wig, her own apartment through the eyes of a stranger. Sees Alex in her leather jacket and feels the overwhelming desire to be accepted, supported. Sees Lena across the L-Corp lobby and feels the overwhelming desire to be loved.

Feels the sharp sting of betrayal, the cracking foundation of everything she’d believed to be true from the inside of an energy extraction pod. Sees her clone – _herself_ – in a blue and red suit, lifeless on the ground, feels the nauseating regret of what she’s just done.

Hears the battle of Super and Luthor from across the city and sees her chance, her one shot at redemption. Feels proud, feels _home_ even through the burning shrieking pain of sacrifice as she lies in her own arms and dies.

J’onn’s hand lands on her shoulder and Kara jerks backwards hard enough to crack his solid oak table. She’s on the ground and trembling, knees pulled to her chest and she can’t breathe, she physically cannot force her lungs to expand and Red Daughter is dying and _she’s_ dying and—

She feels the air around her shift and cool, a balm-like lull washing over her. J’onn. He’s projecting, trying to temper her maelstrom of emotions with his own mind. It’s enough to loosen the noose around Kara’s windpipe and she sucks in a ragged breath, shuddering.

J’onn’s fingers pry open her clenched fists. “You’re okay,” he murmurs quietly. “You’re in my office. You’re safe. You’re safe, Kara.”

She finally manages to open her eyes at that and she sees that he’s right. She’s in J’onn’s office, not dying in an abandoned factory. J’onn still has hold of her hands. “Tell me five things you can see,” he prompts gently, ignoring the way she shakes her head when her throat constricts. “Come on.”

She manages it shakily, the details of her surroundings bleeding back in around the edges of the white-hot terror still gripping at her heart. “Good,” J’onn says approvingly. “Now tell me four things you can hear.”

They move through all five senses until Kara’s heartrate has slowed to a less frenetic pace and she’s able to unclench her own hands from around J’onn’s, who rubs at his skin with a wince and a smile.

He nudges her back onto the couch and brews two mugs of tea. Kara sips it quietly and tries to come to terms with the existence of another person inside her head.

“So I’m not just _me_ anymore?” she asks after a long silence, staring unseeing at the coffee table. “I’m two people now?”

“I don’t think that’s—” J’onn starts but Kara’s already bulldozing over him, the panic in her chest ratcheting up again to critical levels.

“How can I trust myself?” she asks, not waiting for an answer. “How will I ever know what’s me and what’s _her?_ I’m not— I’m not myself anymore, there’s another _person_ in my head and I can’t—”

“ _Kara,”_ J’onn says forcefully and her mouth snaps shut. “You need to calm down.”

She really does. She forces herself to take ten deep, shuddering breaths. Clenches and unclenches her fingers against her thighs, rolling her tense shoulders.

“Now,” J’onn says once he’s satisfied that Kara has momentarily hopped off the express train to Crazy Town. “I wouldn’t think of it like that. Remember, Red Daughter was _you._ The only difference between you was the year you lived apart, and you have those memories now. You know everything she saw, everything she did. Everything she felt.”

Kara stares at him wide-eyed. J’onn rests a comforting hand on her knee. “Think of it like the time you were exposed to Red Kryptonite,” he says, and she can’t restrain her shudder.

J’onn’s fingers squeeze reassuringly. “That was you, a part of you, too. You remember everything that happened, everything you did, but it wasn’t really _you._ You can carry those memories, that knowledge, without losing yourself in it. You still know who you are.”

Kara forces herself to take another deep breath, releases it in a huff. Thank Rao for J’onn and his level head. “I guess that makes sense,” she says at last.

J’onn smiles and pats the back of her hand. “There’s room for Red Daughter in your mind, Kara. You’re still you. And perhaps you should see it as an honour, a way to thank her for her sacrifice.”

Kara tilts her head to gaze up at him questioningly and he squeezes her hand with a gentle smile, a sad smile. “Through you, maybe she can have the chance to live on.”

It’s— well. It’s a lot to take in.

Having someone else’s memories crammed inside her skull, their likes and dislikes and loves and fears, is _exhausting._ And she still doesn’t even know how to relate to the other woman. Hasn’t figured out the position she holds – used to hold – in the topographical map of Kara’s life.

Is Red Daughter the ocean eroding Kara’s cliff? Are they twin peaks? Parallel rivers? Two tributaries converging toward the same destination?

It’s a little too weird, to think of Red Daughter as her clone but— not. How they can be the exact same person and yet wholly different is a trip too far for Kara’s decidedly fragile mind, so she goes searching for other more palatable descriptions.

Sisters, maybe. That’s how Lex had explained it to Red Daughter herself, how he’d glossed over the unconventional truth of her existence. But maybe, beneath the emotional manipulation inherent to the label, he wasn’t so far from the truth. Two people born of the same DNA, distinguished from one another by the circumstances in which they’d grown, by the love they’d found and clung to and the atrocities they’d been forced to survive.

She tries out the label in her mind. Sisters. She’d had a sister. Another sister, a biological twin.

It’s certainly unusual. She’d barely known Red Daughter. Had spent maybe a cumulative hour in her company, ever, and half of that was taken up with trying to kill one another. And yet Red Daughter is a part of her the way Alex is a part of her; rooted deep and pulling on her soul.

What was it Alex had said? Having a sister is like having a piece of your heart out there in the world, just walking around.

And now that piece, yet _another_ piece of Kara’s bloodied, broken heart, is dead.

At least the mood swings make a little more sense now.

They make sense, but remain _exhausting_ to weather. Everything feels sharpened, heightened; guilt blurs into despair which sharpens into fury almost faster than she can track it.

Her reactions aren’t proportionate to her external stimuli, she knows. The sight of her blue ceramic mug on the draining board shouldn’t have her tearing up on the couch, and a commercial for Chocos cookies shouldn’t make her want to put her fist through a wall. Yet here she is, plastering over a sizeable hole in her kitchen backsplash anyway.

A car backfires with the force of a gunshot outside her apartment and Kara almost launches herself clean through the ceiling in fright, heart pounding and hands shaking. It takes a solid twenty minutes for her pulse to return to normal, a heady and completely uncalled for cocktail of terror and adrenaline coursing through her veins.

There seem to be triggers, certain sights and sounds and situations that flip the switch in Kara’s rational mind and allow base instinct to take over. But the instinct isn’t _hers,_ it’s new and unfamiliar and she doesn’t know its peculiarities yet, isn’t versed in avoiding the pitfalls and tripwires that detonate her composure like a flash grenade.

It’s tiring. It’s _frightening._ Kara feels like she’s walking on eggshells around her own mind; approaching her own nervous system with lowered voice and flattened palms so as not to spook it.

The fear and the sadness and the guilt are awful, but worst of all has to be the anger.

Incandescent fury bursts forth at the slightest provocation, coupled not just with the usual struggle to restrain it, but with the active desire to lose control. Each time, as rage builds and epinephrine floods her muscles Kara becomes acutely aware of her powers, her own strength. Not only can she see with perfect clarity the damage she could inflict on this fragile world, but increasingly she struggles to remember why she shouldn’t. Why she _mustn’t._

Why does she have these powers, if not to use them? She intercepts a guy outside the grocery store trying to manhandle a struggling woman into a car, and almost snaps his wrist. Rips the woman from his grasp and pushes her behind her, wraps a fist in the man’s collar and seriously considers throwing him into space. Just letting him fly until he hits a satellite or the moon, whichever comes first.

Sure, her human identity would go up in flames right here in this Walgreen’s parking lot, but at least he’d never be able to make another woman feel afraid.

The most terrifying part of these bouts of anger is how easy, how _right_ it feels to just— be herself. To be Kara Zor-El, Kryptonian. To not hold anything back. Red Daughter’s presence in her mind has stripped back the layers of meticulously-crafted control she’s spent the past decade and a half cultivating, leaving her raw and exposed.

_She_ , after all, had been praised, applauded for her abilities. She’d been _encouraged_ to be strong, swift, brutal, while Kara had always been taught to hide.

Maybe that’s what makes these losses of control so appealing. Maybe some part of Kara, usually kept under lock and key, wants to rebel against the confines constantly hemming her in. Wants not just to nudge up against the restrictions imposed by the need for secrecy, but to break through completely.

To finally, if only briefly, be free.

It’s fine. She tells herself it’s fine. She has a handle on things, she _does._

Until she almost loses it in front of Lena, and suddenly her own platitudes sound a whole lot less convincing.

They’re just out for coffee. Lena had been downtown at an investor meeting and Kara had taken an early lunchbreak to meet her at a bougie new espresso bar in the business district that the younger woman had been talking about trying for weeks.

Everything’s fine. Everything’s good. It’s warm and cosy in the coffee shop. Lena complains about her misogynistic investors as they queue. Kara offers to dig up some journalistic dirt and get them fired. Lena elbows her lightly in the ribs, smiling even as she refuses.

Kara’s drink appears first, and she’s over at the counter dumping twenty packets of sugar into the bitter-smelling concoction to make it semi-potable when she hears Lena’s heartrate triple behind her.

Drink immediately forgotten, Kara whirls to see a huge lumbering slab of a man looming over Lena, one finger jabbing roughly into the lapel of her maroon pea coat.

“You’ve got nerve showing your face in this city, _Luthor.”_ He spits her name as if it’s toxic. Lena recoils as if he’s right.

“Wasn’t enough for you and your brother to almost destroy the world once, huh? Taking over the government to run this country into the ground didn’t satisfy you?” the thug continues, and a muscle in Lena’s jaw flickers. He steps closer, dwarfing her frame completely. “This planet would be better off without the lot of you.”

With a snarl he pulls back, rears up to his full height, and spits in Lena’s face.

Time seems to stand still for a moment. The entire shop is deathly silent, a collective breath held in collective lungs as tension thickens the air. Lena wipes the saliva from her cheek with her napkin without a word, her expression impenetrable. The man takes another step towards her, meaty hand outstretched, but Kara gets there before he can.

“If you touch her, I will end you,” she all but growls and her slacks and cardigan belong to a mild-mannered reporter but her tone cloaks the barely-restrained wrath of the Girl of Steel. The man’s hand collides solidly with Kara’s shoulder and he winces.

Outraged, he squares up. He’s a good half foot taller than her and she can see the pulse thudding in his thick neck, the sweat beading on his upper lip. “You can’t threaten me!”

Lena’s heartbeat flutters like a hummingbird’s at her back, anxious and afraid, and Kara feels a warm rush of strength flood her muscles. Red Daughter’s words echo through her mind unbidden. _Protect your people, as I protected mine._

Lena is her people, her _person._ Kara smiles at the man, slow and predatory. “Try me.”

Her voice is low, soft; the tempting flicker of flame from a lit fuse. Momentary calm belying the explosion primed to rip the world in two. The room is deadly silent save for the high, thin creak of metal as Kara’s spoon buckles and warps in her fist.

The man’s mouth opens and closes like a fish. Kara arches one eyebrow. “Go on,” she says again, an unequivocal challenge. “Try me.”

The man splutters, his face puce. He glares at Lena hard over Kara’s shoulder and Kara feels the looming burn of imminent laser vision announce its presence behind her retinas.

“You need to keep your guard dog on a tighter leash,” he spits at Lena and Kara is a split-second away from throwing her secret identity to the wind and launching the sentient turd into space when she feels a soft hand on her back.

Her breath whooshes out of her at the contact, and with one last contemptuous glare at the beast of a man she allows Lena to lead her out onto the sidewalk without argument.

Once they’re a safe distance from prying eyes in coffee shop windows, Lena whirls on her with an accusing stare. “What was _that?_ What the hell were you thinking?”

Kara pouts. “I could have taken him.”

Oddly enough, Lena doesn’t argue, though the meathead had been easily three times the size of Catco reporter Kara Danvers. She just levels Kara with a firm, meaningful look. “And then what?”

Kara gets the distinct impression that they’re having two conversations simultaneously in this moment: one about the coffee shop incident and one about— something else. Lena’s gaze is laden with some undefined significance, almost as if she’s baiting Kara, daring her to call her on her true meaning.

But what that meaning is, Kara can’t decipher. The anger has dissipated as quickly as it had arrived, the reality of what she’d almost just done crashing back in. She sighs, breaking their stare to shuffle her feet. “I just— I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

Lena barks out a laugh at that; a harsh, bitter sound. “I’ve been hurt far worse than that and lived to tell the tale,” she mutters and Kara’s heart twists at the resignation in her tone.

“Lena, I didn’t—”

“I just don’t think you should be so reckless,” the younger woman interrupts firmly, her stare heavy. “Who knows what could have happened.”

Again, Kara can’t help but feel that she’s missing something here. That there’s a double entendre to Lena’s words that’s going straight over her head. But the bright thrust of her temper has left her drained and she doesn’t have the energy to parse out hidden meanings right now. “You’re right,” she acknowledges quietly. “Sorry. Let’s get out of here.”

The first thing on her to-do list for when she gets home, she thinks as she leads Lena away, is some goddamn anger management.

Gradually, inexorably, resentment builds like sulphur in her chest.

Kara hadn’t asked for this. She hadn’t _asked_ to be split by the Harun-El, hadn’t asked to be re-fused again into someone whole yet wholly different. Reconstituted from her original parts but _more_ than the sum of them now; restored but forever changed.

She hadn’t asked for Red Daughter and the year of life she lived to be forced back into the too-small confines of her head. Hadn’t asked for the stripping back of her control, the meticulous dismantling of each internal defence and fortification she’d dedicated her life on Earth to building.

In fact, she’s _furious._

Furious at herself for touching the Harun-El in the first place, for starting the whole thing off. Furious at Lex for taking a copy of herself and manipulating her, turning her into a weapon poised to destroy everything Kara holds dear.

Furious at Red Daughter for her unsolicited appearance in Kara’s mind. For reshaping her tastes, her preferences, her responses and coping strategies. For how unwieldy and untamed her presence feels; primal and uninhibited and _wild._ For embodying the very combination of factors that could cause the delicate equilibrium of Kara’s half-human, half-Kryptonian existence to come crashing down around her.

Red Daughter is a _threat,_ not just to Kara’s sanity and the safety of any humans in her general vicinity whenever she loses her temper, but to Kara’s very life. To the survival of Kara Danvers as a human-passing Catco reporter. To the endurance of Supergirl as a dependable, trustworthy figure of alien collaboration who can be relied upon only to _help,_ not go on a rampage of terror and destruction because she can’t control her own instincts.

Any sympathy Kara once felt for her sister-clone-body-double evaporates with each new loss of her control, with every impulse she barely resists and atrocity she almost commits.

She resents Red Daughter for existing, and she resents her even more for dying. Which maybe, probably, isn’t fair, given that her Kaznian clone had been both brought into and taken out of this world as a direct result of Kara’s own actions.

But who the hell cares about _fair_ when Kara’s entire existence feels like it’s been turned upside down and there’s no one left alive for her to blame.

Who the hell cares about _fair_ when the only person she can truly blame is herself?

It’s eleven am on a nondescript Saturday morning and Kara has just eaten her way through three boxes of frozen waffles when she gets the sudden and absolutely overwhelming urge to lie down in some snow.

For one long, incredulous moment she just stares unblinking at the coffee table. _Well_ , she thinks tiredly. _This might as well happen._

The morning had already brought her to tears at the sight of an old _Berenstain Bears_ episode on television, and sent her into a brief but _extremely_ intense fury spiral when she ran out of milk that resulted in the rage-smashing of three of her seven favourite mugs, so. What does the addition of yet another inexplicable emotion to the mix really matter.

She just sighs, resigned, and pushes herself tiredly out the window.

She flies first to Northern Canada. Touches down in the middle of the Arctic wilderness and kneels, pressing her palms to the snow in the hope that the baffling craving for some crunchy frozen water will be satisfied and she can go home to resume her _Modern Family_ re-watch.

But it’s not right. The landscape is too stark, too barren, and the snow smells _wrong_ , somehow. Too pure, too alkaline, and Kara has _no_ idea when she developed the ability to tell snow types apart by scent alone, but here she is. All she does know is that this particular snow is _wrong,_ and she’s going to have to keep looking.

She tries Greenland next, but the snow is too mineral-rich from the subterranean hot springs nearby. Touches down briefly in Norway only to push off again almost immediately, the salty smell of the coastal ice an insult to her nostrils.

She’s hovering high above Svalbard when it dawns on her, sudden and sure, where she needs to go. With a huff she shoots off, cursing herself for not figuring it out sooner. She could have watched another episode in the time she’s spent jetting around the globe. Or eaten another three boxes of waffles.

She touches down in Kaznia.

Some part of her – she flatly refuses to think too hard about _which_ part – knows exactly where to go and the second her boots touch earth, she knows she’s made it. The snow crunches just right underfoot, the scent of conifers washing over her as the boreal forest rises up like an old friend, welcoming her home. The craving that had propelled her here is sated almost instantly but Kara’s curiosity is piqued, now. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to take a look around.

She walks first through the taiga, trailing her fingers over the delicate bark of the silver birch trees. The quiet, the stillness, it seeps inside her, quelling the interminable battle raging in Kara’s chest between who she was, and who _she_ was.

Her feet know where she’s going even though her mind can’t chart a course and she soon arrives at a clearing; a gap in the trees filled with charred planks and broken glass. Fury rips through her like a wildfire at the knowledge of what this place is, of what happened here. She drops to her knees in the burnt ruins of Mikhail’s home and screams until her throat is raw.

_She_ had done this, too. She had loved, and she had lost, just as Kara had.

When she can scream no more, when the tear tracks are beginning to freeze solid on her skin and the rising sun is just starting to peek over the horizon, she stands. Shoots off, frozen tears streaming from her cheeks in the wind; a trail of falling ice crystals charting her path.

The army base is deserted. Abandoned. She walks its silent halls, runs her fingertips over the peeling paint and cracking concrete. Sees the hospital bed. Sees the containment chamber. Sees the training room. Turns away with a shudder.

On autopilot, her feet bring her to _her_ room. It’s a burn-out shell, both from the base’s self-destruction and her own laser vision, but the iron bed frame still stands. The walls are scorched, the photos that once adorned them seared into oblivion. In the corner, a pile of ash. She blinks and in its place she can see them all; their brightly-coloured covers and dog-eared pages. Nietzsche. Marx. _The Great Gatsby._ Her only companions in the solitude of this lonely cell.

With the ghost of alarm bells still echoing through her head Kara turns. Pushes off the ball mounts of her feet and flies home. Curls up on her couch beneath her red knitted blanket with her own well-loved copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most iconic novel, and reads until the tears dripping from her eyes and splashing hot onto the pages obscure the words completely.

Slowly, it feels easier to handle.

After Kaznia, after the equal parts peace and anguish she had found there, a new type of tolerance takes root in Kara’s mind. It morphs not just into sympathy but _empathy_ ; after all, the scars born of Red Daughter’s suffering brand Kara now, too.

Slowly, and with great effort, she comes to make peace with the woman inside her head. To notice her, distinguish her, and most importantly to _accept_ her.

Red Daughter’s memories are different from her own. Not just because she hasn’t lived them but in their very quality, their innate essence. It’s as if she views them through some sort of filter, not of colour but of _emotion._

Red Daughter saw the world with childlike wonder and self-righteous vengeance and her perspective bleeds through like ink on wet paper, colouring every memory Kara stumbles across.

As she watches training missions in the Kaznian wilderness play out behind her eyelids she realises why this emotional vantage point, so different now from her own, is nevertheless so familiar. Red Daughter experienced the world the way thirteen-year-old Kara Zor-El had, in every superlative shade of emotional intensity.

Dropped on Earth without warning, whether in a Kaznian forest or the California coast, she – _they_ – hadn’t known how to react. Everything was new and bright and inexplicable. The beauty of this planet, intensified by the naivety of awed innocence, was overwhelming. There was such joy to be found, such marvels, yet in an instant everything could evaporate into fear and danger. Things would move fast, too fast to comprehend, riddled with indecipherable contextual clues for which they’d been given no guidebook, no dictionary.

And when the emotional pendulum swung back the other way, the fascination would disintegrate into the gaping maw of fury and injustice that pulses semi-dormant in Kara’s chest to this day.

Red Daughter felt it constantly. She hadn’t been given the time to learn to assuage it, Kara realises. Her life had been ended before she could grow into her maturity. And so everything was felt in extremes, in excess, and beneath it all lay the driving knowledge that something precious, something irretrievable had been ripped from her grasp. The persistent itch at the base of her skull that told her the cosmic balance had tipped away from her somehow; that she would always be left wanting.

No wonder she had been taken in so completely by Lex’s rhetoric of revenge. Even Kara herself, with her decade and a half of experience on Earth, with her years of support and nurturing by the Danvers, struggles to reconcile gratitude for her many blessings with the astronomical losses she’s been dealt. Struggles at times to remain in the light.

She imagines herself at thirteen, wide-eyed and devastated. Imagines the wreckage of her pod being lifted from her body to reveal not her cousin, but the elder Luthor’s shrewd smile.

She wouldn’t have stood a chance. Red Daughter never stood a chance.

Kara presses a trembling hand over her eyes, dislodging tears she hadn’t realised had gathered. She sees them all, then, these pieces of herself. Red Daughter, Bizarro, Supergirl under the influence of red Kryptonite. Herself on Krypton with her family, herself in the Phantom Zone alone. Herself as a child, desperate for love and acceptance and belonging; herself as an adult, seeking still. All the people she’s been, could have been, might never be. None of them her and yet _all_ of them her.

She holds them in her heart tenderly, carefully. Wraps them in the delicate care the universe had never afforded _her_ , and wonders if it will ever truly get easier.

Things settle, a little.

She still hasn’t told anyone but J’onn – who was immediately sworn to secrecy – about the true aftermath of Red Daughter’s sacrifice, or the existence of another’s essence inside her mind.

She just— she doesn’t want her friends to look at her and see _her._ Being Kara, _just_ Kara and no one else, has long been a precious commodity in the double-life of National City’s caped crusader. She’s in no hurry to give it up with the few people around whom she can lay down her disguises.

But things _are_ settling, she’s getting a handle on this new phase of her life, so maybe she won’t ever have to. She still has hot bursts of guilt and sadness and fury, but she lets them wash over her now like a gentle tide rather than facing the tsunami head on and demanding it change its course.

Giving up the battle seems to have been key; not fighting the emotions, not fighting Red Daughter’s very presence, has allowed her mind to calm immeasurably. Has allowed her, paradoxically, to regain some of her control.

But there are still a few tell-tale signs that she hasn’t yet mastered. Like the purple laser vision. Like the way she sometimes accidentally slips into Russian without realising it.

Like, for example, the fact that she can’t stop touching Lena.

She wants it, _needs_ it like an insistent itch beneath her skin, addiction scratching through her veins. And whatever Kara does, however close she gets to the other woman, it never seems to be enough. The thirst in her marrow is never quenched.

Lena is supple and pliant and accepting. She never instigates the contact between them, never deepens it, but she never pulls away either. It worries Kara, at first. Consent and concern for Lena’s comfort is possibly the _only_ combination of factors potent enough to overpower her own desperate urges. So when Lena’s heartrate skyrockets as Kara draws her closer on the couch during movie night, she forces herself to disentangle their bodies.

“I’m sorry,” she starts, tugging at her earlobe as her cheeks flush. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”

Lena certainly _looks_ uncomfortable, eyes averted and jaw tight, but she shakes her head. And instead of pulling away and breaking their bodies apart completely, she leans back in.

But Kara’s still not confident. “No, Lena, I want you to be comfortable—”

“I’m fine.”

“But I don’t want to cross any boundaries without your consent, and sometimes when I—”

“I said I’m _fine,_ ” Lena almost snaps, face hidden from scrutiny where it presses into the fabric of Kara’s NCU sweatshirt. “Whatever is fine. I consent. To whatever you want.”

Kara’s own heartrate takes off like a rocket launcher at those words, thudding hard enough in her throat that even Lena’s human senses must be able to hear it. Something still isn’t sitting right about the whole situation but Lena seems to tire of Kara’s hesitancy, wrapping her own arms tight across her back and tugging _Kara_ closer for the first time.

Increasingly powerless against her own desires the more of Lena’s body is pressed against her, Kara gives up trying to outreason the situation. Lena’s a grown woman, she knows her own mind, and it’s not for Kara to second guess her meaning. If she wasn’t comfortable she would have said so.

She tightens her own hold on Lena, sliding one hand up to cup the nape of her neck reverently beneath the waves of her loose hair. Lena seems to sag against her, releasing the tiniest sigh not even audible to human ears.

Neither one of them pays the slightest shred of attention to the movie that plays on the TV screen for the next two hours, but neither one of them seems to mind.

She still tries not to sleep.

Even with the understanding that Lex Luthor’s near-constant residence in her nightmares is a product of Red Daughter’s memories rather than her own, she’s still terrified. Still patrols late into the night so as to avoid returning to the oppressive dark of her lonely apartment. Still snatches cat-naps at the office and the DEO and anywhere else that’s heavily populated so that when she inevitably jolts awake, ashen and sticky with sweat, she’s not entirely alone.

The dreams vary. Sometimes they’re pure horror from start to finish; missiles and isolation pods and bombed-out wreckage. Sometimes, the threat is less concrete, more psychological. In nightmare after nightmare Kara stands in a barren field, snow blanketing the frozen ground. In front of her, lined up like a firing squad, is her family. Alex, Eliza, J’onn. Nia and Brainy and Kelly. James, Winn. Lena. And Red Daughter, too, holding tight to Lena’s hand.

Dread turns her limbs to concrete and there’s death in the air, she can smell it. It’s heart-wrenching, it’s agony, trying to understand why her family would turn on her like this. Why they’re lined up to carry out her execution.

But at the last moment there’s the hot bite of a Kryptonite dagger between her shoulder blades, Lex’s slick voice in her ear. He has his hooks in her so deep that Kara, a marionette on Kryptonite-laced strings, can do nothing but tremble as her eyes begin to glow purple at the edges. As her own laser vision cuts down every single person she holds dear, one by harrowing one.

It’s a firing squad, yes, but Kara’s not the target. She’s the one-woman fusillade.

They scream as they die, her loved ones. They scream as she kills them. They cry and they beg and they ask her why and she can’t answer, can’t stop, can’t do anything but slaughter.

So. She still tries not to sleep. But tonight, post-rowdy game night, snug and warm in her bed with Lena curled up at her side after one too many glasses of wine, the tug of unconsciousness feels increasingly hard to resist.

She’s lying on her side, staring at Lena’s back, her dark curls fanning out across the pillow between them. Lena’s ribs expand and contract rhythmically, her breathing deep and even in sleep. The entire bedroom smells like her; the floral blush of her expensive perfume, the bright tang of lab explosions mingling with the smoky richness of her hair, her scalp, the nape of her neck beneath the freshness of her shampoo. It makes Kara’s stomach clench. It makes her mouth water.

She’s been very restrained all night; barely touched Lena during the games, didn’t let herself linger in their greeting hug the way she so desperately wanted. She’s even left a respectable amount of distance between them in bed, contenting herself with lying just close enough to feel the heat of Lena’s skin across the mattress, tracing the contours of her body with her eyes rather than her hands.

But then Lena rolls over, nudging closer, nose crinkling as her fingers seek the reassurance of body heat and Kara’s self-control snaps like a wishbone.

She reaches out, sliding her arms around Lena’s ribcage to pull the younger woman against her chest. Rolls onto her back so Lena is draped over her like a blanket, arms and hands and _senses_ full of soft comforting warmth. Lena’s breathing is still steady and slow, apparently undisturbed by the way Kara has wrapped them up together like two halves of the same whole, and Kara feels her throat tighten as she realises that she _could_ sleep, like this. For the first time since Lex, for the first time in weeks she _wants_ to give into the pull of slumber because right now she’s so snug, so safe, that nothing can hurt her. Not even her own mind.

Lex has no power over her here. Which is ironic, she thinks, considering that there are few individuals in the world over whom Lex Luthor held _more_ power than the two people in this bed. Three, if she’s counting Red Daughter.

Because Kara’s sister-clone was by no means the first to suffer at Lex’s hand. His skilful deceit, his artful manipulation, his mastery of operant conditioning could only have come from decades of dedicated study, and what better captive audience to practice upon than his own sister?

A fresh wave of understanding, of empathy and kinship with the woman in her arms sweeps over Kara like a tide. She thinks back to the brief glimpses of her childhood that Lena had shared over the years, to the pain it caused her to read through her brother’s journals in his prison cell. Lex had tried to mould Lena to his image of perfection the same way he had Red Daughter and, when he couldn’t, he’d set about trying to destroy them.

Lena had survived him. Red Daughter hadn’t been so lucky.

Kara’s arms tighten unconsciously around Lena’s shoulders, her waist. She tilts her head to nose against Lena’s hair as a potent cocktail of fury and protectiveness courses through her veins. Lena sniffles against the hollow of her throat and Kara presses a reassuring kiss to her forehead as she tries to convince her clenched muscles to lose their tension.

Lena sighs, and Kara can’t resist pressing her lips to soft skin again. And again and again, nudging in closer to lay kiss after kiss to her hairline, her temple, her brow, peppering her face with the gentlest of caresses. Lena is precious, and delicate beneath her armour. She should never be treated with anything but the utmost care.

If Lex Luthor weren’t already dead, Kara might try to kill him for what he’s done. She was too late to save Red Daughter, too late to save Lena from the traumatic abuse of her childhood, but she’ll be damned if she ever lets anything like that happen to her again.

This must be why, she realises. This must be the reason for the sudden intensity of her feelings for Lena since Red Daughter’s demise, for her insatiable need to be close to the other woman. Red Daughter’s presence in her mind has opened the floodgates on her empathy for Lena’s struggle, has given her first-hand insight into the damage her family inflicted.

_This_ is why she wants to be around Lena all the time. To make sure she can never be hurt like that again.

Kara feels like a blind man seeing the sun for the first time.

It’s as if she’s suddenly gained the ability to perceive a new wavelength of light. As if she’s been facing the cave wall all this time, and only now has she turned to see the objects themselves rather than the shadows they cast.

She’s seeing Lena in an entirely new light. Not that she’s a new person, per se— it’s not that she’s changed. It’s more like a spotlight has suddenly illuminated above the pedestal Kara’s placed her on, throwing her into sharp new focus. The finer details, the smallest intricacies of her have become visible, where before there had been only vague hints and allusions.

Every one of Kara’s senses, every single atom of her is so finely attuned to Lena now that nothing feels hidden. The good, the bad, the twisted and the achingly beautiful; she can’t possibly miss it.

Like never before, she sees how Lena is suffering. She sees her pain, all of it, and she wants to soothe it. To take it away, to carry it _for_ her, even if only for a moment.

This connection to Lena, this affinity born of mutual understanding that Red Daughter’s assimilation has brought her, tugs perpetually on her soul. It’s incessant, and she’s not the only one who’s noticed.

“You’ve, um. You’ve been around a lot,” Lena murmurs over takeout one night, voice measured and careful. Kara pauses mid-bite, sweet and sour sauce dripping from her chopsticks to splatter the table.

“Not that I’m complaining,” Lena hastens to add. “But I know work’s been crazy for you. Don’t you have more important things to be doing than hanging out with me every night?”

Kara swallows, licking a stray drop of sauce from her fingers. Thinks guiltily of the trail of destruction wreaked by Lex and Red Daughter, of all the ways the city’s still reeling. Thinks of what she could, _should_ be doing to help. Thinks of how much she’d rather be here instead.

“I guess, after everything with your brother,” she manages at last, stomach clenching when Lena winces at the reminder, “I just want to make sure you’re okay. That we’re both okay. I suppose the whole thing made me… reshuffle my priorities a little.”

It’s as honest as she’ll let herself be, for now.

Thankfully, Lena seems to accept the half-baked explanation. They go back to eating, trading work anecdotes and cracking light-hearted jokes but Kara’s eyes are still drawn to the perpetual crease between Lena’s eyebrows, the ever-tense set of her shoulders.

Ever since the death of her brother Lena has been carrying a weight she refuses to share. Refuses to even acknowledge, let alone talk about. The loss of a sibling will do that to a person, Kara supposes, even as guilt tightens like a band around her lungs at the knowledge of her own role in Lex’s demise.

Kara wants to soothe her pain. Wants to eliminate it, eradicate it entirely. Wants to convince Lena to lower the walls she’s erected around her guarded heart, to shower her with affection and understanding and the steadfast belief that Kara won’t ever hurt her.

She wants it, so badly she can almost taste the promise on her tongue. But it turns bitter and acrid with the knowledge that such a vow would be duplicitous, doomed, for as long as Lena remains ignorant of her true identity.

The need to tell Lena the truth about Supergirl, about all of it, has played at the back of Kara’s mind ever since she’d watched the young woman turn against her own mother to save the lives of every alien in National City. If she had to put a date on it, had to choose the moment Lena became a permanent and essential fixture in her life, the night of Lillian Luthor’s failed Medusa plot might be it.

Not only had Lena saved countless lives in a way Kara could not; not only had she proven once and for all that the rancor of the Luthor family tree had not permeated to her core, but she’d _inspired_ Kara that night.

She knows now that she’d needed to see it. Had needed the example Lena was on the brink of setting for her. After Astra and Non, after learning of the awful things her parents did in the name of righteousness, Kara had _needed_ someone to restore her faith in the idea that it was possible to rise above family. To do better than the people who made her. If Lena could survive the poison of the Luthors and emerge brave and beautiful and good then maybe, maybe, Kara was not condemned by the sins of her forebears, either.

She owes the person, the hero she’s become, in no small part to Lena. And now more than ever, she owes her the truth.

But first, she has to figure out how to tell her.

It becomes a permanent fixture on Kara’s to-do list. One of those items that weighs constantly on her mind but that she never quite gets round to, recycling it over and over as the guilt stacks up as inexorably as each day that passes.

Wake up. Brush teeth. Save city. Tell Lena.

Wake up. Help Alex. Finish article. Tell Lena.

Wake up. Take out trash. Put out fire. Tell Lena.

The words halo around Kara’s skull on a loop, never far from her focus. Tell Lena, tell Lena, _tell Lena._

Yet the days go by and Lena remains decidedly un-told. If Kara thought the prospect of revealing her identity was scary before, it pales in comparison to the terror that leaves her gasping now when she considers the very real possibility that she might lose Lena because of it.

Now, laden by the compounded weight of Red Daughter’s feelings crushing atop her own, it seems unthinkable. Kara cannot go a day without Lena. She literally cannot be without her. On the days they don’t have plans or Lena is too busy to meet, Kara makes sure her flight path takes her directly over L-Corp or Lena’s apartment as frequently as possible. She’ll perch on the building’s roof, legs dangling out into empty space, and listen to the comforting thump of Lena’s heart below her until she feels like she can breathe again.

The sound is so familiar to her now that if she concentrates hard, she can pick out Lena’s heartbeat amongst thousands of strangers from the other end of the city. She starts checking in habitually, almost obsessively, the way one may repeatedly check a wristwatch. Measuring her days, her life, against the grounding tempo of Lena’s pulse.

She’s in the elevator on the way up to Lena’s office, takeout in hand and civilian identity firmly in place, and she’s so single-minded in her fixation on the rhythmic thudding of Lena’s heart that the proximity of the sound doesn’t even register until the door slides open and Lena herself steps in.

“Kara!” she smiles, surprised. “What are you doing here? I thought we were meeting after work?”

“I, um. I—” she stammers, unable to recall the workings of the English language in this moment, and the scene is suddenly so familiar that it knocks the remaining breath from her lungs.

She’s thinking of the last time she’d been in an elevator with Lena— well, not her, not _Kara._ Almost Kara. Part of Kara.

She recalls Red Daughter’s memory of the encounter as if it were truly her own; thinks of the need that had propelled her to make the trip to L-Corp, the relief she’d felt at seeing Lena at last. At being close enough to reach out and touch her, if only she’d been brave enough.

_Why_ had Red Daughter been so drawn to Lena? What implacable force had driven her to seek out a woman she’d never met?

“I, I brought you lunch,” Kara manages at last, conscious of the awkward silence anticipating her response, cheeks burning beneath the weight of Lena’s curious gaze. “I wanted to make sure you ate.”

Lena smiles and Kara’s eyes catch on the slight indent at the bridge of her nose; the remnants of a morning spent in the lab behind safety goggles. She’s overcome suddenly with the urge to reach out and smooth it, soothe it, perhaps it kiss it away, and—

Oh. _Oh._

So, this feeling in her chest is—

All along it had really been—

She can see it clearly now: Red Daughter’s presence in her mind hasn’t intensified her feelings for Lena because of their analogous suffering at Lex’s hands. It’s not empathy or kinship tugging them together now. It’s— Rao. It’s _love._

It all makes sense at last. Red Daughter’s obsession with Lena, the way she was drawn to her like a moth to a flame— Kara’s seen it before. She’s _done_ it before. It’s— it’s _her._

Red Daughter hadn’t felt anything for Lena that Kara herself hadn’t felt tenfold. Her clone, her blank-slate copy had woken up in the Kaznian wilderness without so much as a memory but still with the tingle of longing at the base of her skull. She’d felt the pull, the draw, and she’d followed it to its source. First Alex, and family and belonging and home. And then Lena; acceptance and beauty and _love._

Rao. How could she have ever been so blind? Everything she’s done for Lena, everything she _wants_ to do— how could she have ever believed the intensity of her feelings for the other woman were a symptom of anything _but_ love?

And it’s not the best friend, I-like-getting-brunch-with-you-every-other-weekend kind of love she’d occasionally given voice to over the years. It’s bigger than that, deeper and brighter and all-consuming. It’s the ordinance of a destiny willingly chosen, the unshakeable conviction of how _right_ she feels when she’s at the zenith of Lena’s orbit.

It’s _I don’t want to be_ _in this world without you._

The realisation that she may, in fact, be in love with her best friend _does,_ oddly enough, end up occupying the majority of Kara’s brain for the rest of the day. In fact, she’s pretty sure she can safely wager that it’s the most mind-blowing, life-altering information she’ll absorb today.

But it seems the universe has other ideas, when her phone lights up that evening with James’ contact photo on proud display.

She drops the four packets of chips she’d been about to carry over to Lena’s couch back on the kitchen counter, freeing up a hand to answer the call. “James,” she greets, trapping the phone between her shoulder and ear and gesturing apologetically to Lena, who pauses their queued up Netflix selection. “What’s up?”

“Oh my God, Kara, you got it!” James half-yells down the line, made louder still by Kryptonian superhearing, and the agitation in his tone has Kara reaching unconsciously for her glasses before she registers that his energy is positive, not panicked.

“What?” she frowns, grateful that for once she’s not receiving a frantic phone call because yet another of her loved ones is in peril. Grateful that she won’t have to shoot off and cut short her evening plans with Lena. “James, what are you talking about?”

“The Pulitzers!” James yells, and Kara has to hold the phone away from her ear at his volume. “Your exposé on Lex! Catco submitted it for the Investigative Reporting prize and you got it! Kara, you _won.”_

Kara blinks, trying to shape the words into some semblance of meaning in her mind. “I… won?”

“You won!” James reiterates as across the room, Lena quirks a questioning brow. “You, Kara Danvers, are a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist. Congratulations!”

“Oh my God,” Kara murmurs, eyes wide and mind blank. She says goodbye to James on autopilot, dropping her phone unceremoniously onto the counter and bracing her hands against the marble in shock. A moment later Lena is beside her, a hand landing warm on Kara’s arm.

“Are you alright?” she murmurs, green eyes wide with concern.

“I— yeah,” Kara manages at length, still reeling. “That was James. I, um. I think I won a Pulitzer?”

Lena’s mouth drops open. “For your piece on Lex?”

Kara nods, a little unsteadily.

“That’s— Kara, that’s— wow,” Lena whispers and the haze of shock that has kept Kara rooted to the spot thus far evaporates, pure elation flooding her veins. She wraps her arms around Lena’s waist, spinning the two of them round the kitchen and only _barely_ managing to keep both feet on the ground when the excitement in her bones has her floating on air.

Lena chuckles, breathless and dizzy, when Kara finally sets her back on her feet. “I’m not surprised,” she whispers against her neck, shaking her head, her eyelashes fluttering against Kara’s throat. “It seems you were born to do incredible things. To far outshine the rest of us.”

Kara swallows hard, throat tight and world still spinning a little too fast, a little too bright.

“Well, I couldn’t have done it without you,” she hushes out against Lena’s hair, with a reverence badly-hidden and a love that burns on her tongue.

She’s not just talking about the article.

Gradually the excitement softens, tempered by wine and the Maldovian ale Lena produces with a celebratory flourish. It mellows into something gentler, smoother; something that wraps around Kara like a mother’s arms, a lover’s embrace. Tender and certain.

They’re slanted close on the couch now, Lena’s thighs draped over Kara’s lap, her body tucked into Kara’s side. Kara takes advantage of the way Lena’s head has nestled into the crook of her neck, tilts her face to nose into her hair and breathe her in.

She uses the arm wrapped around Lena’s shoulders to card her fingers through dark curls, watching the way the golden light picks out strands of shining amber. The setting sun streaming in through Lena’s floor-to-ceiling windows makes her hair look like spun silk, her skin glowing ethereal alabaster. Everything about her is warm and soft and perfect, from the way the sleeves of her worn-soft sweatshirt envelop her hands entirely to the way her socked toes curl every time she chuckles at the old _Gilmore Girls_ rerun playing quietly on the TV.

Kara’s not paying attention to the show at all. The entire inmate population of Fort Rozz could parade through the living room doing the cancan in this moment and Kara thinks she still wouldn’t be able to tear her eyes away from the woman burrowed into her side.

Lena is already pressed against the length of her but Kara wants her closer still. Wants to be saturated, satiated by nothing but her.

Her right hand, resting atop Lena’s bent thighs beneath their shared blanket, abruptly feels almost criminally underutilised. She spreads her fingers, flexing them a little against the sheer material of Lena’s yoga pants, stroking lightly. Holds her breath suddenly because, hey, maybe friends aren’t _supposed_ to casually massage each other’s inner thighs. She’s pretty sure Alex might have mentioned something to that effect once.

But Lena doesn’t push her off or pull away. In fact, she barely reacts, gaze still fixed on the screen. The only sign she’s noticed at all is a slight tightening of her fingers where they’re fisted into the bottom of Kara’s hoodie. And maybe her heartrate picks up a little, but it’s possible that’s just Kara’s own.

Everything is quiet and still for a few moments, settling. Adjusting. And then Lena lets out a tiny little sigh as she shifts and presses her legs together, effectively trapping Kara’s hand between them. It’s light, the barest hint of pressure; less of a squeeze and more of an acquiescence. An encouragement.

It spurs Kara in her gentle exploration and she tightens her other arm around Lena’s shoulders, bending at the elbow to bury her fingers in thick dark hair. One hand scratches lightly over Lena’s scalp, teasing at the nape of her neck while the other continues its investigation of her thighs. They’re soft and full and strong beneath her rubbing, stroking fingers and Kara wants to stay here forever. She wants to learn every inch of Lena’s body. Wants to map a course through that which is as yet uncharted. Wants to claim it as her own.

The room is so warm, so still, and a part of Kara has long believed her god had forsaken her the day her planet shook itself apart but somehow this still feels like reverie. Like rapture.

This day, this moment, is _perfect._ Lex is gone; the world is safe. Her journalistic career is scaling heights she’d never dared hope for. And for the first time, Red Daughter’s presence feels not like an intrusion in her mind but more like looking in a mirror. Like the knowledge that where she is, what she’s doing right now, is exactly what the both of them had always dreamed of.

A soft breath sighs out of her. Every one of her senses is overwhelmed by the woman in her arms.

Lena’s grip on her hoodie tightens as Kara’s wandering hand on her thigh slides even higher into soft warmth, fingers splayed and squeezing greedily. The knuckle of Lena’s pinkie finger drags over the skin of Kara’s waist and she can’t restrain a shiver, can’t hold back the swooping of her stomach as the amorphous pull between them builds and builds until she’s not sure how much more she can take.

She lifts her cheek from where it’s resting against the crown of Lena’s head, pulling back just enough that they’re face to face. Lena gazes up at her wide-eyed, her soft exhales tickling Kara’s lips. The air between them is charged and heavy as Lena’s eyes drop to her mouth with devastating inevitability.

She feels both weightless and bound, lighter than air yet subjugated to the ordinance of fate as she leans in closer and closer. Every single molecule of Kara’s body is singing out that this is good, this is right, it was always destined to come to this as her gaze drops to Lena’s lips, but—

But she can’t. She _can’t._ Not like this.

She can’t cross this line, can’t offer up this vulnerability and demand it in return when the image she’s presented of herself thus far is only half complete. She can’t, she _won’t_ make any more memories, have any more firsts with Lena while her dishonesty still sits heavy and accusing between them.

When, _if_ they take this step, Kara wants to do it with every part of herself laid bare. No secrets, no lies, no more barriers between them. She wants all of Lena; Lena deserves all of her.

At the last second Kara tilts her head, evading the press of lips she so desperately craves in favour of resting their foreheads together for a brief moment as she summons her courage.

She can feel Lena’s confusion, feel the questions building in her throat but Kara is already pushing up and away, trying not to shiver at the loss of heat as their bodies separate. She leaves Lena on the couch, brow furrowed and mouth open, to pace the length of the room, one hand tugging rough through her Catco ponytail.

This is it, then. She’s going to do it. She’s going to tell her.

“Lena, I—”

Rao. Considering the astronomical bandwidth this exact conversation has occupied in her mind over the past weeks (months, _years),_ it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect Kara to have figured out her speech by now. And yet she doesn’t even know where to begin.

“Kara.” Lena’s voice is unsure, questioning with the barest undertone of warning. “What’s going on?”

“I— fuck.” Green eyes widen at the profanity, but Kara’s too deep into her panic spiral to notice. “Lena, there’s something I have to tell you. Something I should have told you so long ago.”

Lena is silent, tugging her sleeves back over her hands as she watches Kara with wide eyes. Kara takes a deep, calming breath that doesn’t calm her at all.

“Okay,” she starts, stalling more for her own benefit than Lena’s. “Okay. Lena. You’re my best friend. You’re so— you’re _so_ important to me. And I want—”

One of Kara’s hands gestures vaguely in the direction of the couch where Lena is still curled, as if her flailing fingers can encompass everything that just almost transpired there. Her other hand reaches up to tug self-consciously at her ear as her cheeks burn crimson. “There’s so much that I— for _so long_ I’ve thought about, with you, because I think that I— but I just, I can’t. Not because I don’t want to! Because, oh, believe me— but, but I _can’t._ ”

“Kara,” Lena interrupts, voice pulled taught like overworked metal. “Pick a sentence and finish it.”

“Right. Yeah, yes. Right. Sorry.” God, she couldn’t make much more of a mess out of this if she actively tried. Crossing the room, she takes a seat next to Lena once again, careful not to touch her. Sucks in what may very well be the deepest breath of her life to date.

“What I’m trying to say is, I want this. Us. And I hope— I hope that even after you’ve heard this, you will too. But first, first I have to be honest with you. I’m so sorry it’s taken me this long.”

Kara twists her fingers together tight enough in her lap that her knuckles scream in protest. “You told me once that Supergirl may have saved you, but Kara Danvers was your hero. But—”

Here goes nothing. Here goes _everything._

“Kara Danvers saved you that day. And if she’s your hero, then so is Supergirl because— because they’re both me. Lena, I’m—” Two more words. Two more words that sit like Kryptonite boulders in her throat.

She slips the elastic from her hair, tugs the glasses from her face.

“I’m Supergirl.”

The room is deathly silent save for the thundering beat of Lena’s heart, the harsh pulls of her shallow breathing. As Kara watches, the impenetrable mask of her expression hardens. All trace of confusion drains as her furrowed brow smooths, a muscle in her jaw flickering. Her chin raises a firm half-inch, eyes half-lidded and cold.

Kara’s own heart is thudding so hard against her ribcage that she feels it tremble throughout her whole body. Her entire world has stopped spinning, waiting with bated breath to see how this will play out. To see whether regular orbit can resume, or if the ensuing supernova will knock it forever off its axis.

When Lena finally speaks, it’s not the explosion Kara expects. None of the shock, none of the tears or the screams or the furious disbelief. Her voice, when it comes, can only be described as resigned.

“I know.” 

**Author's Note:**

> comments are my main source of protein if you are that way inclined <3
> 
> musical vibes for this may be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7tIJXTJZjAMN8H2CAUphgy)
> 
> come yell at me on tumblr: [searidings](https://searidings.tumblr.com/)


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